India: examining the motivation for rape

Were Ram Singh and his cohort simply claiming a notion of masculinity promoted every day by their role
models in politics, business and the media? Ruchira Gupta writes of the steady
creeping of a rape culture into the fabric of India, and what needs to be done
to counter the idea that women are commodities

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Sand-sculpture at Alleppey, Kerala, India. Photo: Jennifer Allsopp

Let us talk about Ram Singh, the chief rapist accused in the case of Damini, (the name given to the 23 year-old woman who was gang-raped and later died ) who told his rape colleagues, as they cleaned the
bus, “not to worry, nothing will happen”.

Ram Singh and his cohort have now been formally charged with abduction, gang-rape and murder, but he could so easily have
been right. After all, the
conviction rate for rape cases in India between 2001 and 2010, was 26
percent. And in Delhi, only one in four culprits were punished.

In the case of Muslim and Dalit women the rate of conviction
is almost nil. Three Dalit women are raped daily in some part of our country.
When Bhanwari Devi was raped
in a Rajasthan village, the Judge asked, “How can a Dalit woman be raped?” Most
women say they wouldn’t even think of telling the police about an attack for
fear the cops would ignore them or worse blame them and abuse them.

This culture of impunity certainly emboldened Ram Singh, but
the more important question is what motivated him? Were
Ram Singh and his cohort simply claiming a masculinity as promoted by
their role models in politics, business and the media?

Political leaders of all hues, in their personal
lives, have commodified women both inside and outside the home. The homes of
most male political leaders in India - upper or lower caste - have begun to
reflect the gender life styles of Ekta Kapoor serials on TV,
with women handing over all decisions, including
reproductive decisions, to their husbands and religions, in ‘defence of their
culture.’

Sand-sculpture in Alleppey, Kerala, India. Photo: Jennifer Allsopp

Outside
the home, Bharatiya Janta Party Members in the state of Karnataka are caught watching
pornography on their iPads in the Legislative Assembly. Janata Dal Leaders
have paid women to perform ‘item’
numbers in mass functions, and former Prime Minister P. V Narsimha Rao
writes in his biography, The Insider, how Congress leaders bought
women for sex while attending Congress Working Committee sessions.

Business leaders are seen with paid escorts, hosting rave
parties, consuming porn, and saving their sons from the consequences of molesting
girls. In the culture of “success” that
Ram Singh witnesses in the media everyday, he sees classified advertisement in
newspapers selling female escorts, businessmen zipping around in fast cars with
girls draped on their arms staring out with vacant eyes, and at least one
private airline owner using the ‘casting couch’ to hire sixty airhostesses for
four planes.

While Ram Singh cannot afford fast cars and the accompanying
female escorts, he can certainly buy porn CDs. India has become the third
largest user of pornography in the world. Blue movies and CDs are available
at any video parlour. For many twelve year olds the first sexual encounter is a
pop up character on a TV screen, being penetrated in every part of her body,
with tears streaming down her face, and asking for more.

I would be curious to know if Ram Singh was socialized into
believing that sex was connected to violence through countless hours of
watching porn. I wonder if the police will ask this question during their
investigation? Or have they normalized the degradation of women to the extent
that they will not explore the root causes of the rape?.

In the course of my work with Apne Aap Women Worldwide I
have seen the steady creeping of a rape culture into the fabric of India. We
work to organize women in prostitution to resist their own and their daughter’s
rape. We have been campaigning
to change the anti-trafficking law in order to punish customers and pimps. But
the biggest challenge we face is the normalization of the rape of poor women in
our culture. Their prostitution is considered inevitable and the men who buy
them are considered normal. Politicians, senior police officials, heads of
foundations and even policy makers have told me: “Men will be men,” or “Girls
from good families will be raped, if prostitutes don’t exist”.

These comments perpetuate a notion of masculinity in which
men have unbridled sexual desire, will rape women if they are not obtainable
otherwise, and that poor women should be sexually available to protect
middle-class women!

This is how rape cultures are created. Those in positions of
power who serve as role models for the rest of society do not challenge
prevalent norms, attitudes and practices that trivialize, normalize, and even
condone rape. Instead, they perpetuate the inevitability of inequality between
men and women.

Incidents of rape have gone up by 873 % percent since India gained
Independence. Budget allocations to
successive Ministries of Women and Child have been reduced. Someone of Cabinet
rank has hardly ever represented the Ministry, and some of the weakest and most
inarticulate individuals - such as Krishna Tirath - have been appointed as
Ministers of State. Debates to ensure equal power sharing between the sexes
through the Women’s
Reservation Bill have gone nowhere.

People are now asking for fast track courts for speedy
justice, the death penalty, the immediate passage of the Sexual
Harassment in the Workplace Bill, and chemical castration - of not just the
perpetrators, but all rapists. My question is who and how many people will we
castrate? And will it reverse the rape culture based on sex inequality in
India? Won’t castration or death penalty let those off the hook who are
creating this culture? When can we force the government to increase budget
allocations for women and girls, have better leaders representing the Women and
Child Ministry, and introduce power sharing for women at all levels of policy
making?

An
essential part of efforts to create a contemporary and democratic society in
which full gender equality is the norm, is to recognize the right to equal
participation of women and men, girls and boys, in all areas of society. Any
society that claims to defend principles of legal, political, economic, and
social equality for women and girls must reject the idea that women and
children, mostly girls, are commodities inside or outside the home, upper or
lower class or caste.

We need to make
efforts to create a society where women and girls can live lives free of all
forms of male violence. In combination with public education, awareness-raising
campaigns, and victim support, the law and other legislation such as police and
judicial reforms, needs to establish a zero tolerance policy for sexual
exploitation and violence against women. The law needs to recognize that without men’s demand for, and use of,
women and girls for sexual exploitation, the rape culture would not be able to
flourish and expand. For example, a good response would be to require every
registered business, which requires a license to operate, to subject all
employees to a sensitisation on zero tolerance of sexual violence in and out of
the work place. License renewal could be made dependent on the business
submitting certificates to show that their employees have undergone the
training.

On
a structural level, India needs to recognize that to succeed in the campaign
against sexual exploitation, the political, social, and economic conditions
under which women and girls live must be ameliorated by introducing development
measures for poverty reduction, education, sustainable development, and social
programs focusing specifically on women.

The
work to end rape requires a broad perspective, and a will to act in a wide
range of policy areas. It also requires the involvement and collaboration of a
broad variety of public and private actors, besides an overhaul of measures to
combat all sexual violence within the justice system and, more important,
measures that concern protection of and assistance to victims need to be
developed and implemented. As Naila Kabeeer rightly says in her article
on openDemocracy 50.50 “Making
zero tolerance on violence against women a central platform in post-MDG agenda
would have, at the very least, a powerful symbolic impact”.

Like many others, we
have sent our recommendations to the Justice
Verma Commission which has been set up by the Union Government after the
huge public outcry. We wait and watch, and
hopefully, this time round, some concrete legislative changes will happen that
will in some measure change the lot of the woman in free and democratic India.

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